Friday, January 27, 2012

I heard
from the PO as hoped, paid the charge (you don’t want to know), arranged
delivery for today, and now can only sit here breathless, waiting for my
madelinetosh yarn. I don’t dare go across the square to get the newspaper. They’re
just waiting around the corner for the chance to put one of those Dread Cards
through the letterbox.

I can while
away the time watching the tennis. I am a great Andy Murray fan, unlike anyone
else I know. If he wins this morning (Djokovic) he’ll win the tournament, I
think – but that’s about as big as “if’s” get.

Tomorrow
our niece and I are going for a walk, as we occasionally do. This is a more
ambitious one than usual, in DevillaForest near Kincardine.
(TERRAIN: track & path; HEIGHT: negligible – that’s the kind of walk I like.)
We will see a standing stone marking the site of the Battle of Bordie in 1038, when King Duncan and Macbeth defeated
the Danes. When I read that I wondered for a moment if that was the battle at the beginning of
the play – would we be able to find the ashes from the witches’ bonfire? But no
– Shakespeare says that battle was at Forres, against Noroway.

If we get
lost, as is all too likely since the forest is criss-crossed with paths and
neither of us is very bright, we can find ourselves by walking south. That will
eventually bring us out on the main road on which we arrived. We could probably
do that by remembering that the sun is in the southern sky, but I also recalled
that there is a way to use one’s watch as a crude compass. I looked it up on
Google – how did we live? before Google – and today mean to practice, since I
know how Edinburgh
is oriented. I may have acquired a Survival Skill.

It’s the
“Moor” colorway which my husband finds “outré” for a gent’s sock, Mary Lou. We had feared that
“Anthracite” would be too blue – he doesn’t like blue – but it’s fine. I’d knit
“Sizzle” for a female, so he wouldn’t be called on to judge it. I am steaming
away down the foot, and should finish a ball of yarn today – that always feels
like progress.

I bought
only two 50 gram balls this time. That’s not enough, I knew it wasn’t. I’ll
finish off with something from the odd-ball bag. “Anthracite”, in this
case, will do nicely. The demarcation comes well down within the shoe. It has
proved acceptable in the past to do this, and it reduces the cost of the socks quite a bit.

I got spammed today -- it doesn't often happen. All comments on posts older than a fortnight are automatically presented to me for moderation -- they are 99% spam. Comments on new posts go through Blogger's system, which is pretty good at spotting junk. But today I got seven or eight long identical junk-comments from India on recent posts of mine, I had to delete them one by one. I hope I've got them all. Boring and -- as far as I could see -- pointless, rather than malicious or obscene.

2 comments:

Spam from India? Oy. I hope that it is not somehow connected to my comments here. Who understands all the hocus pocus of the Internet? Not me, that's for sure.

I am following the progression of your Sky Scarf with great interest. I love the idea, and may try one when I live somewhere where knitting is a reasonable pursuit. I both miss it terribly, and feel completely disinclined to do it.